Archive for June 11th, 2011

I have no talent as a gardener. It has taken me many years to get one small patch of land to grow anything at all. Heaven knows how many innocent seeds died to grow the limited repertoire that is there now.

But there’s one exception to this sad history. The lily below was received as a gift, the kind of thing one gives and never expects to see again. The lily was transplanted. Despite minimal care, it has bloomed every year for the last… six, I think. Today–I don’t think this was an optical illusion–it began almost white, and a delicate lilac color developed as the sun hit it. I’ll post it again if the color deepens.

The next week, however, I produced another report, “The Pentagon Can’t Count: 22 Juveniles Held at Guantánamo,” providing evidence that at least 22 juvenile prisoners had been held, and drawing on the Pentagon’s own documents, or on additional statements made by the Pentagon, to confirm my claims.

Two and a half years later, I stand by that report, and am only prepared to concede that up to three of the prisoners I identified as juveniles may have been 18 at the time of their capture. In the meantime, I have identified three more juvenile prisoners, and possibly three others, bringing the total back to 22, and possibly as many as 28.

Thirteen of the individuals mentioned in this table have now been released. Of the other two, one is the first child
in History to have been convicted of war crimes (Omar Ahmed Khadr); the other allegedly killed himself in his Guantánamo cell at age 21 (Yasser Talal al Zahrani). Information about them and many other prisoners can be found elsewhere in this website; pictures of some of them can be found below.

So regardless of whether one uses the 15 or the 22 figure for the total number of kids held at Gitmo, it’s clear that the majority were found to be innocent of alleged terrorism and released, and should never have been kidnapped in the first place.

Call me evil, but I think that holding innocent kids for months and years without charge (and getting off scot-free for it) is far more of a crime than an innocuous Twitter exchange.